Single engine confidence

[Rudolf]

When flying in a single engine, do you always fly where feasable emergency landings can be made (near straight roads and long fields), or do you have 100% confidence in your engine (i.e. over forests)?

[Tim]

nope and nope

if you try to stick to areas that only have suitable emergency landing areas you'll find most of the country is inaccessable by plane

and i dont think youll find many people that say they have 100% confidence in a single

[iflyforpie]

Nothing is ever 100%. Look at how many twin engined aircraft have run out of fuel (the great equalizer). Also you have to consider other factors, like the fact that weather claims far more aircraft than mechanical failure.


I met this guy when I was getting some avionics work done in Creston. I'd just flown over the Purcells in a 206, dodged a few cells along the way, landed, and had some time to kill while getting the job done.

This guy comes up to me and boldly says that he has an aircraft he wants to sell our company to help save the lives of young, working pilots such as myself (his exact words). I asked him what it was and he proudly told me that it was his Beechcraft Dutchess. He then regaled me about how it could maintain 10,000 ft single-engine (uh huh) and various performance specs that seemed more in line with a Baron than a 180HP Dutchess. I used to fly a Sundowner (single Dutchess) and it was work to get it above 8000ft without having to lug a dead engine and retractable gear crookedly through the air.

He took me out to lunch and his vehicle seemed to fit the same profile, an H2 Hummer.

I didn't explain it to him because I was too polite, but both of his vehicles are safer in one or two respects compared to others (single engine planes or two wheel drive vehicles) but each come with a huge list of liabilities. The Hummer is heavy, has a high center of gravity, and lacks the responsiveness of a smaller vehicle. The four wheel drive and size just encourages you to drive beyond the vehicle's capabilities. The Dutchess is also heavy (high stall speed, large turning radius) and even if it could maintain 10,000 on one engine, that isn't enough to guarantee obstacle clearance when IFR and the aircraft would be absolute hell when trying to .. run on two engines never mind one.

So as single engine pilots, what do we do? For our company, we try and mitigate risks. We do more than is required to maintain our engines (oil changes every 25 hrs, plugs cleaned every 50, factory remanufactured engines). We set high weather minimums (even that day: vis was unlimited, uppers were light, no frontal activity and fat isobars), we fly high so we can at least make it to the bottom of the next valley, and the aircraft we fly have very low stall speeds. Kinetic energy varies by the square of the speed, so if I go in with minimum speed and under control, I have a much better chance of survival.


I'm not saying that single-engine is safer than multi-engine. A King Air in the Flightlevels all deiced is going to be much safer than my 206 (though probably not when doing a night-circling approach at minimums). But for running in the mountains, single engine is acceptably safe and more so IMHO than an underpowered light piston twin trying to go VFR.

The BC Forest Service was going to mandate all twin-engined aircraft for Fire Patrols until it was pointed out that every single crash at the time involved a twin-engined plane.

[lionheart27]

What about water?
Range is the distance to land plus safety margin for point of no return half way in case of weather and position reports and survival gear. No sharks in Canadian waters?

[ditar]

He then regaled me about how it could maintain 10,000 ft single-engine (uh huh) and various performance specs that seemed more in line with a Baron than a 180HP Dutchess. I used to fly a Sundowner (single Dutchess) and it was work to get it above 8000ft without having to lug a dead engine and retractable gear crookedly through the air.

When I did my multi rating in the Duchess, we did the engine shutdown exercise at 8000'. It handled reasonably well, as I recall. That was in January, mind you, and I don't remember how close we were to gross, either.

A few years of experience later I now realize how stupid that exercise is!

[CpnCrunch]

Everything that Pie says!

Engine-out landings in something like a 172 are very survivable if you are wearing a harness and you fly it just above stall speed into the trees.

You are more than twice as likely to kill yourself in a multi-engine plane accident as in a single-engine accident (33% fatal vs 14%):

http://www.aopa.org/asf/publications/08nall.pdf

The two main factors are stall speed and complexity - both of which are against you in a multi-engine plane.

As Pie says, mitigate your risk by making sure your plane is well maintained, don't fly in marginal weather or beyond your ability, and if possible try to have a place to land if the engine fails (or if not possible, at least have a plan).

The best thing you can do is to prepare yourself mentally for an engine failure. The biggest killer is not actually the engine failure itself - it is the pilot's response to it. Particularly if the engine failure is shortly after takeoff, many pilots make the mistake of either trying to turn back to the airfield or simply of stalling the plane by holding the nose up and trying to 'keep it in the air'. When you have an engine failure you must immediately push the nose down. (If your doesn't drill this into your head, get another instructor!)

Bottom line is that if you fly safely, a single-engine plane is no more dangerous than driving your car on the highway.

[Hedley]

I fly single-engine piston/prop across the Gulf of Mexico, and I fly single-engine ex-military jet with cold ejection seats. But, I do my own maintenance.

[chipmunk]

I just ferried a single engine vintage airplane with its original old Gipsy engine from Ontario to the Los Angeles area, and you can bet that I was always within gliding distance of a decent landing area. For most of the US, however, that's pretty simple - a good percentage of the time I was actually within gliding distance of an airfield - until you get to the big rocks out west, and from there I stayed within decent distance of a road and/or suitable flat areas in valleys. The "worst" spot was flying through the LA basin, but I went fairly high there to get more of a cushion, just in case.

On the occasion that I fly Caravans (that are meticulously maintained by a very small core of excellent AMEs) for work, I have no problem flying them at 250' over the jungle, but we make a point to mark locations of roads, clearings, and such as part of our risk analysis.

And when I was instructing on Katanas way back when... yeah, I always had my eye out for a suitable field...

[GoinNowhereFast]

I fly single-engine piston/prop across the Gulf of Mexico

Makes fuel stops easy. If you ever need gas, you could just land and fill 'er up. There's a STC in the states to run planes on "gulf water"

[hairdo]

... yeah, I always had my eye out for a suitable field...

I think a pilot of any single should always, at any point of a flight (especially at low altitude), be able to tell you with minimum to no hesitation where they would land if the engine were to fail at that point. If you can't answer the question within a few seconds or less, you're getting complacent and if the engine does fail, you're going to be hurting for it.

So I would say that I am pessimistically confident in a single. Pretty sure that it isn't going to fail (it doesn't really happen much with a good engine and good maintenance), but I'm not bettin' the farm on it, so I have a backup plan ready to rock in case the sh*t hits the fan (or rather, the fan stops turning... ).

[cgzro]

I used not to think about it when I was younger and flying out in BC. We'd zip across the straights without much thought. Now that I'm older/wiser and own my own plane I'm much more cautious. I've had a couple of problems on short trips (muffler/oil pressure sensor) that if they had happened on longer over water or over mountains would have been extremely unpleasant so I now tend to plan trips so that I have lots of options. Fuel and weather however are really the biggest issues. If you make sure you have plenty of fuel and decent weather the odds of problems are extremely small, especially if you keep a careful eye on the engines trends etc. over its lifetime.

However I have recently started flying behind a Kinner 5 cylinder radial made in 1940 and must admit that I'm likely to treat that engine with lots more caution than I do my Lycoming.
Peter

[Big Pistons Forever]

Flying is all about risk management. There will always be risks to flying but you can often greatly reduce risks with very little operatinal impact. So for single engine aircraft risk reductions my 02 cents is

1) Fly as high as is practicable and reasonable. Height equals time. Time increases your opportunity to get the engine going and gives you a more options on where to park it. If you are flying over nasty terrain a few well placed zigs and zags can keep you over better terrain with surprisingly little effect on total trip time.

2) Learn to recognize what your engine is telling you both in the runup and when you are in the air. Engines will very rarely just up and stop. They will usually give you some notice that they are having mechanical issues.

3) If you have suffiecent uncontaminated gas and the fuel selector properly positioned in the aircraft and do not let carb ice develop you have reduced the chance of an engine failure by around 80 %.

4) The biggest cause of light single accidents is pilot skills which were insufficent for the occurance landing or takeoff. Don't want to be in an aircraft accident, practice your stick and rudder skills.

5) If you are going to kill yourself in a light aircraft it will mostly likely be due to pushing weather.